Editor’s Note: This is the second in of series of articles exploring the use of heroin among the young people of South County, and how it affects their lives. Click here to read the first installment.
Great Barrington — I talked to a local and former heroin user about her experience, and what the power of heroin acutely means and feels like.
“When you’re high, you can literally choose how you want to feel,” she recounted. “You’re not on planet earth anymore and you can feel or think about anything you want, but my thing was thinking and feeling nothing.”
She had been diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and endured anxiety through her life and “was never a person who could stop thinking. I always had too many thoughts in my head. I worked so hard all my life just to live my life and I felt like I needed something for myself.”
She was twenty and already feeling more open to trying drugs. At the time she had a boyfriend who had been keeping his habit with Percocet a secret for two months. Eventually, he lost his job and told her about his habit because he wanted her to buy them. One day, she tried it herself, and they would take it together after that. After a while, she could not afford to buy Percocet anymore and her boyfriend suggested heroin because it is cheaper and does the same thing, “which it definitely does not,” she pointed out. But she was looking at $60 versus $20 a day for her and her boyfriend.
She started snorting heroin for three months, and somehow did not get sick. She noticed that when most of her friends had to go — or chose to go without — they got sick, but for three months she did not get sick.
“I remember the day I realized it had never made me sick,” she said, “I had the thought that I would never get addicted physically because I hadn’t gotten sick, and then the next morning I woke up sick.”
After this first time getting sick, she tried to kick the habit and did for a little while, but her friends were also addicts and were around her shooting up frequently.
“Being sick from heroin is the worst thing on earth,” she said. “Your skin hurts, everything hurts, you can’t hold any food down, you start shaking.”
While she was sick, she saw her friends shooting up around her, saw how quickly shooting up took that sickness away, over and over, and replaced it with whatever that vastness is, and that was when she switched from sniffing to shooting. After doing that for another year she lost her job and ended up homeless.
She had been living in Northampton through all of this, where “for some reason it felt acceptable to be an addict,” and she and her boyfriend increased their usage while they were homeless.
“When you’re homeless you’re more depressed about everything, and it’s also harder to sleep at night when you’re outside on the ground,” she said.
She said the best experience she ever had on heroin occurred when she and her boyfriend got enough money to get a hotel room and more than enough heroin to get really high. They had not been able to watch television in almost a year.
She said her worst experiences typically came from the fights caused about who paid for how much and who got to do how much. She never overdosed herself, but toward the end of her experience as an addict she had someone overdose in her car.
One afternoon, she and some friends went to score with someone they did not know very well. They did not want to hang out with him after they got the heroin. They knew he had already been drinking and, not knowing him well, did not want to risk the accident. They had to take him to get everything, however, and after they did they went back to where she was staying.
He had asked her repeatedly if he could shoot up in the car and eventually she gave up saying no, and “he overdosed before he even got the needle out of his arm,” she said.
She was afraid he was dead. His heart had stopped before the ambulance got there but the EMT’s managed to resuscitate him before getting him to the hospital.
Soon after that she decided to quit.
“When I really decided I wanted to quit, I went straight to my mom’s and detoxed on the couch because I didn’t want to go to a facility. A facility feels like a different form of heroin, trading one reliance for another, and if you go to a facility then it doesn’t stick in your brain how bad it is to detox. My detox from the drug is the reason I stayed sober. It’s been a year and a half.”
She believes that the community plays a huge role in the life of the addict.
“In Northampton and Holyoke, it just felt like more people did it than not. It wasn’t weird to be a crack head or a dope head.”
She says we need to be more careful about how we distribute pain killers and opiates, and that detox centers should change the way they see detoxing, “because they try to take the discomfort away, and that doesn’t help people not go back.”
Maybe people do heroin for one of the same reasons that other people do not do it: fear. We live in an onrush of modernity, in which everything, from each stop sign to each skyscraper, distracts us from the primary two facts of our lives: that one day we will die and that every other day we must live.
In this time, this century, and for this generation, we live in almost a complete illusion of safety, of convenience, idealism. The constant message — indeed from every stop sign to every skyscraper — that our world is right, that it has been constructed correctly, and is infallible. We try to love and work through the day but sometimes people would rather check out.
I don’t think it is the right decision, but it does not surprise me. Nobody tells you how to deal with life and death anymore. Our lives are tucked away in the convenience of our buzzing towns and televisions and cell phones and jobs and chores, and our deaths are tucked away in hospitals and nursing homes, and countries we don’t have to survive in.
Consequently, we are distanced from the most fundamental two facts of ourselves: that we will live and we will die. This causes an inarticulate fear, an inherent, underlying emptiness in the modern individual, especially among the youth. Taking heroin, a drug that allegedly takes you out of yourself and away from the planet, simplifies the horrors that we do not know how talk about. On heroin — and most other drugs to a lesser extent — one can accept death and deny it at the same time, and living as yourself every day may no longer become daunting, as the drug consumes both your self and your days.
This is the fastest, most unnatural time of human history, only becoming faster, more unnatural, and more confusing. Nobody teaches you how to slow down and stay lucid in a world that goes way faster than you, and some stumble.
I hate heroin. I hate that it disappeared some of my childhood friends, killed others, and left still others straggling down my Main Streets with those shadows in their cheekbones — who look like they wish they could remember me, or who remember me but wish they could still talk to me, who every day risk their lives for the need of a false wholeness, who tend to an emptiness that the rest of us often choose to ignore, and who are then often dealt with by means of punishment rather than help. I do not like anything that comes with it.
The other day I spoke to a homeless man. I’ve heard more words in rumors about him than words he himself has spoken to me, but some locals say he did this horrible thing and others say he did that one, and a band of angry teenagers even came over when the homeless man walked away from me, and talked about how they wanted to show him a lesson, put him in his place, make him shut up and keep eating out of the garbage like the bum he is, and the less blunt ones just threatened to call the cops and have him put in jail.
“Sucks there’s nothing anyone can do about this,” said one of them.
I was a lot more comfortable having a conversation with the man himself than all these people — people I knew and cared about — who seemingly wanted him dead.
I do not know who the homeless man is or where he came from or what he did, but I know everybody who was talking about him, and none of them said anything like, “I wonder if there’s someone around he can talk to,” or “I wonder how we could get him help.”
I do not know what it is about this country — probably a lot of things, take your pick — that makes us so naturally respond to human suffering with punishment. Everybody wanted to kick his ass, or yell at him, or have him arrested.
This is one of the main flaws in the so-called “war on drugs” — if such a “war” indeed exists and if it is, indeed, an actual “war” on “drugs.” People do not seem to get better by being shamed or punished and then sent back to the same places to deal with their problems in the same way. Maybe that homeless person in town would stop supposedly doing all of these supposedly horrible things if, when he did wrong things he was helped as a result and not punished and if, when simply sitting on a bench having a conversation with a person, everybody didn’t want to beat him up and call the cops.
An addict needs help, and apparently, the idea behind the American justice system is to not help addicts at all, but rather to reassure the so-called law abiding citizens with the concept that punishment and incarceration is the way to deal with distressed individuals. Yet, maybe we could, instead, find ways to help criminals abide by the law, and addicts to find a way out of their habit. Most people are not hopeless. Most people do not need anything like heroin and, most people will, given the chance and the help from other people, unleash a multitude of goodness if their dark blanket is truly lifted, if their lives can be at once unveiled, challenged and complete. They could be better, sure, but we could be better, too, and as a community we should acknowledge, learn from, and understand suffering.
